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CAMPBELL — Immediately after Los Gatos senior Yost Girvan took a knee with under 40 seconds remaining at Westmont High, he turned around looking for the rest of his teammates as the Wildcats stormed the field.
Top-seeded Los Gatos bookended its Central Coast Section portion of the schedule with shutouts of No. 7 Oak Grove, including a 21-0 victory in the Division II championship game Friday night.
“It feels so surreal,” Girvan said. “It hasn’t even kicked in.”
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It’s the second CCS title for the Wildcats under coach Mark Krail, who first raised the trophy upon taking over the program in 2013.
Los Gatos (12-1) finds out its fate for next week’s NorCal regionals on Sunday.
“Some of the guys have been taking a peek at the message boards, and I just kind of superstitiously tried to stay away from that,” Krail said. “Tried to stay in the moment, so we’ll find out Sunday. I don’t know if we’ll be on the road, sounds like we probably will. But we’ll go out and have fun.
“That’s all icing on the cake for this year. They accomplished what they set out to do and I’m really proud of them.”
Oak Grove (10-3), which lost 44-0 in the season opener to Los Gatos, wouldn’t go away until the final minutes.
The Eagles, who benefited from an interception in the end zone by Louis Barber and the recovery of two muffed punts, went into halftime trailing 7-0.
But penalties kept coming back to haunt the offense, whose only trip into the red zone ended up in a turnover on downs early in the fourth quarter, unable to cut its 14-0 deficit in half.
“We were really hanging in there on defense, but towards the end there were a few plays they made that were big-time plays,” Oak Grove coach Marcus Reese said. “Their defense is phenomenal and I consider Krail one of the top two coaches in our area.”
Los Gatos ended a scoreless deadlock on an 11-yard touchdown pass from Girvan to fellow senior Gian Lagemann with 5:24 left in the second quarter.
The defense promptly forced a three-and-out coming out of the locker room, after which running back Adam Garwood got going following halftime adjustments with consecutive runs of 25, 22 and 11 yards — the latter a TD to make it 14-0 less than two minutes into the second half.
“They were loading up our tight end side, so we went a little unbalanced line on them and they were struggling to figure that out,” Krail said.
Girvan, who finished 6-of-12 for 110 yards along with 14 carries for 65 yards, capped the scoring with 3:39 to play.
Facing a third-and-31, he found a wide-open Kyle Pinkham for a 43-yard TD in which the junior needed to juke one defensive back.
“It’s one of those things,” Krail said. “You get a guy open and it works.”
Oak Grove, which exceeded expectations after a rough 1-2 start to the season, reeled off nine straight wins to finish unbeaten in the Bay Valley Athletic League Mt. Hamilton Division.
“We were ranked No. 4 in our league before we got into the season,” Reese said. “For these kids to climb up this far and make it to the championship it shows a lot of the character and work ethic that they displayed through the season. It was amazing. I’m really proud of these kids.”
In the end, like most teams, the Eagles couldn’t solve the riddle of Los Gatos’ defense, which came away with a pair of first-half turnovers on a fumble recovery by Ricky Moore and a diving interception off a deflected pass by Carson Gardner.
“We heard a lot about how they grew up, but I think we grew up too as a team,” said Krail, whose defense held opponents to 18 points in the CCS playoffs. “I think we got better as the year went on. Our defense got better and better and better each and every week.”
Are the defense and the rest of the Wildcats ready for what awaits beyond, with the possibility to advance to a state final?
“I don’t even want to think about that right now,” Girvan said. “We gotta celebrate our championship.”
